Leopold proposes a steep windfall tax on executive pay and bonuses, tied directly to the U.S. unemployment rate:

Now is the time for a policy that directly connects the well-being of Wall Street to Main Street. Congress and the Administration should call for a steep windfall tax on all Wall Street profits and bonuses, directly tying the tax to the unemployment rate. The justification is simple: When the economy crashed, we put the entire financial sector on welfare with bailouts valued somewhere between one and thirteen trillion dollars (depending how you count the various liquidity programs and asset guarantees.) Welfare recipients are not entitled to windfall profits.

We should start with a windfall profits/bonus tax of 90 percent as long as the yearly average unemployment rate is higher than 10 percent. Then it could drop as follows:

75 percent until the yearly unemployment rate drops below 9 percent;

60 percent until it drops to 8 percent;

45 percent until it drops below 7 percent;

30 percent until it clears 6 percent and;

15 percent until it crosses 5 percent.

Full-employment (below 5 percent) would automatically end the windfall tax.

This is the issue. Corporations are completely divorced with the U.S. national economic interest and look at workers as some sort of commodities to be discarded instead of having any sense of responsibility to the U.S. labor force.

This is why we get CEOs offshore outsourcing jobs at the drop of a hat. Being fired these days is so common, it has no correlation to meritocracy or job performance. There is a Schindler's list mentality towards employees.

We need to get all businesses, operating in the United States, to have responsibility to the U.S. workforce and to the national economy as part of their charter.

Hitting them in the pocket book might be a way to do it.

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Yeah, but you have Mr. Corporatist Obama in the White House. And I don't mean to dump just on him. Also all the corporatist shills in Congress and the Supreme Court. They consider corporations to be people.
This is a great idea. But how do you get an unmotivated populace to push their Congresspersons to do right? Especially with that clown Lieberman?

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We have Republicans using Populist issues when their policies and agendas are even more corporate corrupt. We have a "grassroots" (corporate sponsored of course) Tea Party who has taken those corporate lobbyist ideas and made them even worse.

Even if you manage to get some representatives into Congress who would vote on the facts, stats and good ideas, what works...

the Congressional leadership (both sides) will not let good policies/bills/legislation get a vote on the floor, the control of Congress goes to "party leaders" as well as Committee chairs...

and then we have Obama. Now why anyone believed he would ever push for policies like the above is beyond me, but in my opinion, he never was this "Progressive" so many deluded themselves into thinking he was.

I guess a key would get Majority leaders, committee chairs who weren't corrupt, demand that they put committee chairs to those who know what they are talking about and are not corrupt, not seniority, not favoritism and also change the rules to enable more bills to get to the floor..

But bottom line is we cannot get one line of legislation through Congress that wasn't corporate written or it's extremely difficult.

Believe it or not, I think Bernie Sanders has managed to get some amendments through and how he does that, I really don't know, but of course corporate lobbyists go after even those after the bill has passed, through conferees (as we saw with financial reform).

It seems beyond the reforms most are talking about, public financing and so on, Congress and how it works needs dramatic reforms so sane legislation, built on actual facts and theory to work have a prayer's chance.

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